


Waste of space

by Aethelar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 18:29:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8589184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: Because all eyes were on Harry, even his parents', but somewhere in the background Dudley grew up.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I just have a lot of feelings for Dudley, you know? This is inspired by the scene (I think deleted scene?) where Harry leaves Privet Drive for the last time and Dudley says, "I don't think you're a waste of space."

i. When Dudley leaves the house at number 4 Privet Drive, he turns to his cousin and says, I don’t think you’re a waste of space. Harry says, Thanks.

ii. When Harry cried in his room, muffled and stifled but easily heard through the thin door, Dudley made him cups of tea. They sat on the side until he gathered the nerve to take them upstairs, by which time they were always cold. He poured each one down the sink and promised himself that the next one, the next one would make it upstairs.

iii. When the councillor at school says, Your father tells me you’re going to work in management, Dudley nods. His father is sure to remind him of his future when he thinks Dudley has forgotten. When the councillor recommends English and History and IT, Dudley listens, and puts himself down for Art and Geography and Philosophy. Philosophy apparently comes with Religion, and Dudley studies miracles and Hume’s principles and wonders what his teachers would make of magic.

iv. When he passes his exams he gets a handshake from the headmaster and three pieces of paper to say that he’s not as lazy as Smeltings thought he was. His future lies ahead of him, a land of taxes and mortgages and gym memberships that he can’t afford but can’t afford to give up if he wants to see the far side of fifty. Aunt Marge presses a sweaty twenty into his hand and his mother presses a kiss into his cheek and he feels guilty, suddenly, for being proud of what he’s done. Harry saved lives and saved the world and Dudley can identify sedimentary rock by the layers it’s made of.

v. When his mother says cautiously, Does it pay well? and his father scoffs and says, Don’t be so daft, Pet, he’s not serious, Dudley takes out the budget he painstakingly put together and the listings of studio flats that fall within it. He keeps his gaze focussed on the tulips growing in his mother’s window box and talks about dreams and doing something worthwhile and doing something to help.

vi. When his mother hugs him, he is surprised to find that her cheeks are wet with tears. I’m proud of you, she says, and Dudley thinks, I’m not.

vii. When Harry was in the garden and his parents were in the kitchen and everyone was trying to pretend that this wasn’t the last night they’d spend in their own home, Dudley slipped into Harry’s room. I don’t know how this works, he told Harry’s owl, But this is our new address. Let me know that he’s ok, yeah? He pushes the folded up piece of notepaper between the bars of her cage with a pencil so that she won’t bite him, and leaves the room with her unblinking stare weighing heavy on his back.

viii. ~~When the owl never shows up~~ Dudley doesn’t think about the fact that owl never shows up.

ix. When he arrives for the first day of school with a second hand suit and a new file folder with meticulously detailed lesson plans, the deputy headmistress raises an eyebrow at him. It’s good that you’re motivated, she tells him, but don’t let the kids know you’re an idealist. They can smell weakness. She smiles a sharp, lemon-sour smile, and rattles off the list of troublemakers in 3B that he needs to watch out for and makes sure he knows where the coffee machine is in the staff room.

x. When he sees that one of the troublemakers is short and skinny and glares balefully at the world like it’s done nothing but hurt him, he has to take a moment. When he sees that the other troublemaker is shorter and decidedly not skinny and has already learnt that the only way to not be bullied is to bully someone else instead, he has to take several. He fills a coffee mug with shaking hands from the machine and promises his cousin who may or may not be dead that he’ll try. He wishes he could promise more.

(The skinny boy is called Miles and he’s good at maths and good at science and good at keeping all eyes on him. The class giggle nervously when he challenges Dudley’s authority and the tilt to his mouth says the detention is entirely expected. Dudley spends the half hour at lunch painting props with him for the Christmas play and doesn’t try and ‘understand’ him, and that, he thinks, is not expected. By the fourth detention, Miles is criticizing the stable’s colour scheme and showing Dudley how to draw Orion in white spots of paint for the starry backdrop.)

(The girl is called Jessica and she’s fat and she’s stupid and being mean is all she has left. Dudley sits with her at the back of the classroom and explains in the way that finally made sense to him when he was fat and stupid and mean. He listens patiently while she stumbles her way through words she doesn’t know in the set reading, and hands her a paintbrush with a hopeful smile. She ruins the bristles by slamming the brush down on her desk and never uses it to paint with. Her mother, when she finally deigns to turn up to parents’ evening, is bored and uninterested and says that books are expensive but the TV is free. Dudley falls apart and pulls himself back together and sits down with another maths problem and another way of explaining it and tries again.)

xi. When Danny from 6H ends up on the school roof and claims he doesn’t know how, Dudley’s heart races. He wants to talk to Danny. He wants to pretend he never heard the gossip in the staff room. He wants to assure Danny’s parents that it’s normal, for a given definition of normal, that Danny isn’t a freak and should never be made to think he was. He wants to promise them that it’s wonderful. He wants to warn them that it’s awful. He wants to tell them about a boy who drove off the monsters and saved Dudley’s life. He wants them to know about a boy who went to war and never came back. He wants, for Danny’s sake, for the boy to have climbed the fire escape with no trace of magic and have lied to the teacher that caught him where he wasn’t supposed to be.

xii. When Dudley leaves the house at number 4 Privet Drive, he turns to his cousin and says, I don’t think you’re a waste of space.

Harry says, Thanks, and he sounds like he doesn’t believe it. Dudley stays up until 3 in the morning every night for the next forty years trying to earn his forgiveness, penning constructive criticism in green pen that most of his students won’t read. He starts the drama club and when that fails, he starts the art club, and he turns down a promotion to stay with the kids that aren’t going anywhere. He never marries and he never dates, and his mother looks around his spartan flat with pursed lips and gives him yet another pot plant from her overflowing garden. He makes sure that every child that walks through his classroom door knows that they are not. a waste. of space.

One time, his students say it back to him. He says, Thanks, and doesn’t believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a tumblr! Come find me at [aethelar.tumblr.com](http://aethelar.tumblr.com)


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